1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the operation of Enterprise Rights Management systems and more specifically, to enabling deduplication in an Enterprise Rights Management system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Organizations often maintain and handle sensitive data using computer systems and networks. Such data may be considered sensitive from a business and/or legal standpoint. For example, an organization such as a legal department may maintain confidential legal documents on its systems.
Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) systems may be used to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access. In such systems, a file (or part of a file) that contains sensitive information may be encrypted and the encrypted data associated with one or more access rights. Various strong encryption algorithms may be used by ERM systems to perform this encryption such that a user that obtains the ERM-protected, encrypted file cannot decipher its contents without the proper decryption key. Encrypted data may be referred to herein as cipher text.
In some ERM systems, a user may assign access rights to data using a publishing license. The publishing license may be combined with cipher text to produce ERM-protected data, which can only be accessed according to the access permissions.
ERM-protected data may be stored alongside unprotected data on various storage systems. In some storage systems, such as backup storage systems or storage service systems, it may be desirable to reduce the amount of storage space required to store the data by deduplicating redundant data. For example, a storage client may be configured to detect an attempt to store data to a storage system that already holds a copy of the data. In response to detecting this, one example storage client may be configured to not copy the data to the storage system, but instead, to register its interest in the data with the storage system. Thus, with deduplication, only a single copy of the data is stored on the system at any given time, thereby reducing the storage space requirements for storing the data.